Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck

Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up wit... See more

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And mor... See more

Funding is an especially acute pain point for scientists, who spend up to half their time writing grant proposals. Success in getting funding is heavily tied to metrics such as the h-index, which quantifies the impact of a scientist’s published work. The resulting pressure to “publish or perish” incentivizes the pursuit of novel research over work ... See more

The 1970s were the high point for “vast amounts of theory applied to extremely small amounts of data,” as Paul Krugman put it to me. We had begun to use computers to produce models of the world, but it took us some time to recognize how crude and assumption laden they were, and that the precision that computers were capable of was no substitute for

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In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

So we should often expect to see the following, which seems to fit the above charts: a given area (literature, film, etc.) gains an initial surge in interest (sometimes due to new things being technologically feasible, sometimes for cultural reasons or because someone demonstrates the ability to accomplish exciting things); this leads to a surge in... See more